1,156 research outputs found

    Service-Oriented Architecture for Patient-Centric eHealth Solutions

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    The world is in shortage of about 7.2 million healthcare workers in 2013, and the figure is estimated to grow to 12.9 million by 2035, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). On the other hand, the median age of the world’s population was predicted to increase from 26.6 years in 2000 to 37.3 years in 2050, and then to 45.6 years in 2100. Thus further escalating the need for new and efficient healthcare solutions. Telehealth, telecare, and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions promise to make healthcare services more sustainable, and to enable patients to live more independently and with a higher quality of life at their homes. Smart homes will host intelligent, connected devices that integrate with the Internet of Things (IoT) to form the basis of new and advanced healthcare systems. However, a number of challenges needs to be addressed before this vision can be actualised. These challenges include flexible integration, rapid service development and deployment, mobility, unified abstraction, scalability and high availability, security and privacy. This thesis presents an integration architecture based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that enables novel healthcare services to be developed rapidly by utilising capabilities of various devices in the patients’ surroundings. Special attention is given to a service broker component, the Information Integration Platform (IIP), that has been developed to bridge communications between everyday objects and Internet-based services following the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) principles. It exposes its functionalities through a set of RESTfulWeb services, and maintains a unified information model which enables various applications to access in a uniform way. The IIP breaks the traditional vertical “silo” approach of integration, and handles information dissemination task between information providers and consumers by adopting a publish/subscribe messaging pattern. The feasibility of the IIP solution is evaluated both through prototyping and testing the platform’s representative healthcare services, e.g., remote health monitoring and emergency alarms. Experiments conducted on the IIP reveal how performance aspects are affected by needs for security, privacy, high availability, and scalability

    Med-e-Tel 2016

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    A Component-Based Approach for Securing Indoor Home Care Applications

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    eHealth systems have adopted recent advances on sensing technologies together with advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to provide people-centered services that improve the quality of life of an increasingly elderly population. As these eHealth services are founded on the acquisition and processing of sensitive data (e.g., personal details, diagnosis, treatments and medical history), any security threat would damage the public's confidence in them. This paper proposes a solution for the design and runtime management of indoor eHealth applications with security requirements. The proposal allows applications definition customized to patient particularities, including the early detection of health deterioration and suitable reaction (events) as well as security needs. At runtime, security support is twofold. A secured component-based platform supervises applications execution and provides events management, whilst the security of the communications among application components is also guaranteed. Additionally, the proposed event management scheme adopts the fog computing paradigm to enable local event related data storage and processing, thus saving communication bandwidth when communicating with the cloud. As a proof of concept, this proposal has been validated through the monitoring of the health status in diabetic patients at a nursing home.This work was financed under project DPI2015-68602-R (MINECO/FEDER, UE), UPV/EHU under project PPG17/56 and GV/EJ under recognized research group IT914-16

    Med-e-Tel 2013

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    A framework for cloud-based healthcare services to monitor noncommunicable diseases patient

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    Monitoring patients who have noncommunicable diseases is a big challenge. These illnesses require a continuous monitoring that leads to high cost for patients\u27 healthcare. Several solutions proposed reducing the impact of these diseases in terms of economic with respect to quality of services. One of the best solutions is mobile healthcare, where patients do not need to be hospitalized under supervision of caregivers. This paper presents a new hybrid framework based on mobile multimedia cloud that is scalable and efficient and provides cost-effective monitoring solution for noncommunicable disease patient. In order to validate the effectiveness of the framework, we also propose a novel evaluation model based on Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which incorporates some criteria from multiple decision makers in the context of healthcare monitoring applications. Using the proposed evaluation model, we analyzed three possible frameworks (proposed hybrid framework, mobile, and multimedia frameworks) in terms of their applicability in the real healthcare environment

    Med-e-Tel 2017

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    Developing a new understanding of enabling health and wellbeing in Europe: harmonising health and social care delivery and informatics support to ensure holistic care

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    Europe faces significant challenges to its health and care services due to demographic change, being at the beginning of a large and continuing rise in the number and proportion of older citizens, while advances in healthcare mean that an increasing number of these and other adults will have enduring chronic health conditions. But for all citizens with actual or potential health problems, the maintenance of optimal health depends not just on healthcare services, but on support for nutrition, hygiene, mobility and shopping, socialisation, warm dry housing and other aspects of daily living, as without these health will be compromised and deteriorate. This demand surge is happening at a time when Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are increasingly being used in other service sectors to enable consumer customisation and better resource management. An objective for all health systems, and for patients, is to minimise hospital stays and maximise care at home, but hitherto the practical need to observe the patient's state of health has extended hospital stays. Similarly there is a drive to minimise for quality of life and economic reasons admission to long-term institutional care and instead extend support to enable living at home. Traditionally any support needed by an individual has normally been provided by family members, often assisted by the local community, while social services have been the fall back provider when the family cannot support, either by direct provision or by mobilising specific services such as delivered hot meals. Housing agencies and other bodies have also had an important role. However, other demographic changes are significantly reducing the capacity of families to provide daily ongoing support. This means that health services are increasingly providing long-term monitoring and support to those living with chronic disease and frailty, while social services are increasingly needed to provide ongoing support. Many individual citizens are necessarily in receipt of both health and social care support, yet in all but a very few European countries these services are provided quite independently one from another, with minimal day to day liaison. A number of drivers for change are now necessitating significant change, and the social sciences have a key role to play in enabling successful progress. At a macro level, across Europe the combination of the economic downturn and the demographic-led increase in demand means that health and social care services are under ever increasing pressures, while constant growth of services is not affordable nor will the labour market support ever continuing expansion. This paper presents the case for systematic research activity in the social sciences, at European and national levels, to further the interlinked citizen- focused objectives of:close integration at delivery level of health care and social care support of individual's health, personalisation of care delivery including reasonable accommodation of individual choice, ensuring effective use of ICT applications based on user acceptability, bringing processes of consent, delegation, representation, coordination and privacy into the electronic era, ensuring respect for and teamwork with formal carers and the informal care team, ensuring equity in an electronic era regardless of digital literacy, assets and connectivity, examining stable and sustainable models of trusted infrastructure provision, establishing governance, authentication, management, and sustainability principles

    Internet of Things Architectures, Technologies, Applications, Challenges, and Future Directions for Enhanced Living Environments and Healthcare Systems: A Review

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    Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolution of the Internet and has been gaining increased attention from researchers in both academic and industrial environments. Successive technological enhancements make the development of intelligent systems with a high capacity for communication and data collection possible, providing several opportunities for numerous IoT applications, particularly healthcare systems. Despite all the advantages, there are still several open issues that represent the main challenges for IoT, e.g., accessibility, portability, interoperability, information security, and privacy. IoT provides important characteristics to healthcare systems, such as availability, mobility, and scalability, that o er an architectural basis for numerous high technological healthcare applications, such as real-time patient monitoring, environmental and indoor quality monitoring, and ubiquitous and pervasive information access that benefits health professionals and patients. The constant scientific innovations make it possible to develop IoT devices through countless services for sensing, data fusing, and logging capabilities that lead to several advancements for enhanced living environments (ELEs). This paper reviews the current state of the art on IoT architectures for ELEs and healthcare systems, with a focus on the technologies, applications, challenges, opportunities, open-source platforms, and operating systems. Furthermore, this document synthesizes the existing body of knowledge and identifies common threads and gaps that open up new significant and challenging future research directions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
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